World Enough

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Nova Scotia author Lesley Choyce has written 26 books since 1980,
including 13 works of fiction. Some of them, including the novel under
review, are Maritimes stories that display a keen social awareness.

On the surface, the plot of World Enough is delightfully escapist. Alex
McNab, a failed graduate student from New Brunswick, finds redemption in
New Dawn, a bankrupt Halifax rehabilitation workshop whose clients
include a brain-damaged ex-Mountie, a blind teenager, and a
“schizophrenic” Wiccan woman. There is love, laughter, and
cheekiness—Alex teaches the car-loving blind youth how to drive.

Just under the surface, but still very real, are the hard socioeconomic
realities that confront these characters. Their sheltered workshop is
viewed as a “dinosaur from the age of compassion” and slated for
extinction. The political becomes personal for Alex when the federal
finance minister punches him on national television during a
demonstration. (Here Alex is the obvious fictional counterpart of the
Hull heckler who experienced Prime Minister Chrétien’s “Shawinigan
handshake.”) The resulting negative exposure backfires as the
humiliated politician uses his influence to target New Dawn for closure.


Choyce’s offbeat realism is “Groucho Marxist” in character, with
underdogs pitted against unfeeling bureaucrats and a
“winner-take-all” society. His book is recommended for those who
wouldn’t want to join a “new economic order” that would admit
them.